Staff & Crown

by W. R. Gingell

  On the badminton field, Lady Caro looked sharply to the trees, her racquet swinging easily up as if it was a sword instead of a racquet, and Isabella said, “How odd. Nan, did you—”

  “I saw,” Annabel said, with some grimness. “Girls, you’d better all start going back to the school building, I think.”

  “Why should we do as you say?” demanded one of the smocked girls around Lady Selma. “Who are you to be telling us what to do?”

  “I don’t think it particularly matters who I am,” remarked Annabel; “but there are at least half a dozen men sneaking through the decorative shrubs at the moment, and you might want to know who they are. Actually, I’d rather we all just went back to the school building, but I suppose you can stay and ask them who they are if you’d like.”

  Lady Caro, her eyes narrowed on the foliage, didn’t respond.

  On the other hand, Lady Selma blinked her pale blue eyes and said, “How ridiculous.”

  There was a sudden murmur of uneasy girls that was cut short by a very sharp, very distinctive click.

  “Bother!” said Annabel. She knew that sound very well by now. “They brought pistols.”

  Through the trees came three men, their pistols ready cocked and levelled; another two came silently from either side, backing the girls into the tree-shaded net that formed the other side of the badminton court.

  It was at that moment Annabel truly realised the accuracy of Isabella’s statement that the badminton court was the best place to make allies. Not one of the girls around her attempted to scream. Each from a rich and influential family, these girls had been well taught in the arts of being held hostage and kidnapped for ransom. Annabel had been taught the same things—albeit in a more practical fashion than most of the other girls—and she was very familiar with the concept of quiet acquiescence while watching for opportunity, as well as the well-drilled idea of keeping alive to stay alive. Training or not, however, it wasn’t so easy not to scream when a pistol was thrust into your face ready loaded and cocked, and Annabel felt the first stirrings of real respect for the girls of Trenthams.

  “I call that rude,” opined Isabella. Annabel wasn’t sure when she’d moved—perhaps that had been Isabella backing across the field, as though frightened—but now the other girl was very close. In a much quieter voice, Isabella added, “I suppose the chances of your being able to do the same thing you did last time…?”

  “Pretty good,” Annabel murmured. “If they’re not the same ones from the other day and know what I could be up to, and if I can have a bit of time to myself without them seeing what I’m up to.”

  “Not to worry, Nan,” Isabella said, her voice quiet and satisfied. “If there’s anything I know how to do, it’s make a distraction.”

  “You two,” said the one who seemed to be the leader. He was pointing at Lady Selma and Annabel; as they watched, that pointing finger beckoned. “Over here. You too.”

  You too was aimed at Isabella, who shrugged elegantly and came to join Annabel and Lady Selma at the forefront of the group of girls. Lady Caro, who had edged forward too, hung back just slightly, and Annabel wondered if she had imagined the other girl’s hand slipping into a hidden pocket. Did Lady Caro, too, have a small pistol holstered about her thigh? Annabel, feeling the tightness of her own pistol strapped around her leg, was thankful that she’d made herself continue to wear it despite the heat.

  “Over to the side,” said the leader, to the three girls. “And don’t move too quickly, if you please, ladies.”

  “Stay away from the little plump one and the skinny red-head,” called one of the other men, sharply. “Gregor says he doesn’t know how they did it, but one of them managed to slip the firing pins right out of the pistols.”

  A small murmur spread through the huddled girls. Annabel had wondered if there would be rumours from that day—it seemed as though there had been.

  “Oh, was that what it was?” Isabella asked agreeably. “The firing pins? So fortuitous!”

  “It won’t be so fortuitous for you, Miss Farrah,” said the leader of the Old Parrasians—for Old Parrasians they must be. “And it’s no good trying to figure out who we are this time, either.”

  “Is it not? I’ll remember that.”

  The leader nodded toward the girls. “Check their pockets. That one had a pistol last time.”

  “What nonsense!” said Isabella. “A girl of Trenthams, with pockets? Simply not to be thought of—ask the Awesome Aunts, and they’ll tell you at great length the risks associated with Allowing Young Ladies to Obtain Pockets.”

  Despite that, however, both Isabella’s and Annabel’s seams were examined with great attention; and when at last their captors declared them to be without weapon, it wasn’t without Annabel feeling a chill of fear that they would somehow manage to find the leg holster Isabella had purchased from the Blacksmith’s son, and the slit in her right hand pocket that gave access to it.

  “Now,” said the leader, “we can start having a bit of fun. We’re here for the queen heir.”

  “Which one?” asked one of the girls. It wasn’t until Annabel caught sight of a dark head of hair being tossed, and a distinctly sarcastic smile that she realised it was Fern. “We’ve got two queen heirs here, and you’ve already separated them. Which one did you want?”

  “Perhaps they’re looking for quantity over quality,” suggested Isabella. “A sound strategy in the general run of things, but I can’t help feeling that’s a little short-sighted in this case.”

  The Old Parrasians looked between themselves and then to their leader for guidance. He opened his mouth, closed it, and finally said, “Both of them,” but not before Fern’s sarcastic smile had a chance to become even more sarcastic.

  “All right, you’ve got us,” Annabel said, nodding at Lady Selma. “Two queen heirs. You don’t need the rest of the girls, do you?”

  “Can’t let ’em go; they’ll tell the teachers,” said one of the men.

  Annabel glared at him. “Well, can’t you take us elsewhere, then? You don’t need to take all the other girls, just me and Lady Selma.”

  “And me,” Isabella said. She smiled sweetly at the grouped Old Parrasians. “You’ve no idea how much trouble I can cause when left behind. Far safer to have me with you, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t try to trick them,” said Lady Selma, turning her cold blue eyes on Annabel. “The queen heir can’t die a stupid death because you wanted to save a few lives.”

  “It’s common sense, not a trick,” Annabel said, feeling her first twinge of real, personal dislike for Lady Selma that wasn’t prompted by the fact that she was pretending to be what Annabel really was.

  “We’re not taking any of you anywhere,” the leader said shortly, “so you might as well stop squabbling. The sooner you cooperate with us, the sooner you’ll be let go. There’s no need for anyone to try and be clever, or get hurt.”

  “We might have a better chance of cooperating with you if you told us what you wanted,” Annabel said, with some asperity. “Why do all of you Old Parrasians talk so much? You never get to the point.”

  “We didn’t say we were Old Parrasians!”

  “You talked about the firing pins,” Annabel said. “Who else would you be? Are you stupid?”

  “Exactly my feeling,” agreed Isabella. “A failure to get right to the point presupposes a muddled mind—amply proved already, I fancy—and one should always be careful when dealing with those possessed of muddled minds.”

  “Who are you calling muddled, you—”

  The leader turned a glare on the rest of the Old Parrasians. “That’s enough. It was when they got the others to squabble that they took the firing pins. Pay attention.”

  “All right, then,” said Annabel, who felt like this debacle had gone on for quite long enough. Even girls who had been trained for the eventuality would become sick of having pistols waved in their faces at some stage, and she was quite sure that Lady Caro was prepared to do som
ething by herself if no one else did anything. She was also quite sure that Fern, who was suddenly very close to Lady Caro, had formed the same idea; she was significantly less sure of how many girls might be shot if things went badly. “All right then. You’ve got pistols, and you want our attention. We’re paying attention. What is it you actually want?”

  “The staff,” said the leader of the Old Parrasians. “We want the staff.”

  “It won’t do you any good,” Annabel told him. “It won’t work for you.”

  “It wouldn’t work for you, either,” Lady Selma said, cutting in on the distinctly interested babble of noise that had woken in the girls from the other group. “Since you’re not the queen heir.”

  Annabel said, with a distinct steel to her voice, “We’ll have a conversation about that later. In the meantime, do you have anything for these…gentlemen?”

  Lady Selma tilted her chin just enough to make a clean-cut line of her jaw. “Of course not. Why should I?”

  “You,” the Old Parrasian leader said, turning his pistol on Annabel, “where’s the staff?”

  “Do you think I’ve got it in my pockets?”

  “Exactly so!” agreed Isabella. “Did I not just tell you about Trenthams girls and pockets?”

  “Actually, I have got pockets,” Annabel said, since the Old Parrasians showed no signs of taking notice of Isabella’s aside. “Would you like to see what I’ve got in them? My sketchbook and pencil. One handkerchief. You can wipe your noses with that, but it’s about the only thing that’ll be useful to you.”

  One of the girls in the other group giggled, and several Old Parrasians glared at Annabel through their masks. Impervious to giggles and glares alike, Annabel merely held out the few things from her pockets, and with a heart as cold as ice said, “See for yourself. Just give them back when you’re done—I haven’t finished a few of the drawings.”

  The Old Parrasian leader looked at her with suspicion but instead of snatching the things out of her hands, as she had been very much afraid he would do, only snapped at the others, “What are you doing? Check her pockets properly!”

  “One wonders,” said Isabella to no one in particular, and gazing at no one in particular, “exactly how it is that one is supposed to fit something as large as a staff in one’s pockets. Presuming one has pockets, of course, which as I have already told you, is unlikely in the extreme.”

  “You!” said the Old Parrasian leader suddenly to Lady Selma, as if he had only just remembered her. “What have you got in your pockets?”

  “I have no pockets,” Lady Selma said coldly.

  “Oh,” said the leader. “Well, check her for pockets, too, I suppose. It won’t do any good, but you might as well.”

  Isabella gave a sudden gurgle of laughter that made more than one girl from the other group look at her in distinct worry. To Annabel, quietly, she said, “Oh, how amusing!”

  “Actually,” said Annabel, in a likewise lowered voice, as the Old Parrasians tugged at the outraged Lady Selma’s skirts for any sign of pockets, “I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty tired of being held at pistol point.”

  “Yes, but isn’t it amusing!”

  “I suppose,” Annabel said quietly, refusing to feel in the slightest bit amused, “that you’re talking about the fact that they can’t seem to decide who to treat like the queen heir.”

  “Exactly so! Which besides being a little bit clever, is more than a little bit stupid in quite another way; not to mention counter-productive.”

  Gloomily, Annabel muttered, “I told you it was probably the Old Parrasians behind Lady Selma.”

  “I acknowledge that you were entirely correct!” Isabella admitted, at once. “It was very forethoughtful of you, Nan! They’re certainly being very careful not to give the idea that they know she isn’t queen heir, at any rate, while at the same time focusing all the more invasive attention on you. Not to mention they’ve already tried to kidnap you twice; but that’s by the by, I suppose.”

  “I would like to know—actually, no, I’ll try to figure it out later. I’d better do something about the Old Parrasians, first.”

  “Do you think you can?” Isabella’s voice was speculative. “I hate to seem to doubt you, Nan, but there are at least six of them, and they all have pistols. I’m not particularly fond of many of these girls, but I wouldn’t like to see them injured.”

  “If I don’t, Lady Caro is going to,” pointed out Annabel.

  Isabella asked, in surprise, “Lady Caro?” but by then the Old Parrasians were finished with Lady Selma, and she didn’t have the chance to speak again.

  As Annabel put away her sketchbook and handkerchief, and wrapped her hand a little more tightly around the pencil staff, she saw Isabella gazing at first thoughtfully, and then more speculatively at Lady Caro. So Belle had seen the pistol too, had she? Isabella didn’t seem surprised about it, merely more watchful. That put to rest any hopes Annabel might have had about Lady Caro holding her peace to let others fix the problem. Obviously, Lady Selma was as averse to sharing information with her co-conspirators as was Melchior.

  The Old Parrasian leader drew back a little, eyeing the other group of girls with narrowed eyes, and Annabel had the faintest thread of an idea—both of what he would do next, and of what she could do to stop it.

  He was going to grab one of the girls—the closest one, probably Fern or Lady Caro, who had somehow managed to be right at the front—and he would offer, in the friendliest way possible to begin shooting one after the other until she told him where the staff was. And so Annabel, as the Old Parrasian leader took a step forward again and started to say, “If that’s how you’re going to play things—” lifted her pencil staff to the ready and drew without leaving a line in the air before her.

  She had never drawn an invisible thing before, and it was difficult to tell if there was a slight shimmer to the air between the Old Parrasian leader and Fern, for whom he was reaching, or if Annabel was only imagining it.

  Lady Caroline already had her pistol out, pointed directly in front of her with her body turned to the side, and the Old Parrasian leader, his own pistol still only half raised, froze with his other hand part way toward Fern.

  Was that an oddness to the air? Had it worked? Annabel, cold to her stomach, wasn’t sure. She and Isabella were exposed, Lady Selma with them, but that wouldn’t matter if only she had managed to keep the other girls safe for now behind an invisibly-drawn barrier of magic.

  Every other Old Parrasian pistol pointed at Lady Caroline; who, with her pistol directly against the Old Parrasian leader’s head—and there was, wasn’t there? the vaguest suggestion of shimmer between the two?—pulled the trigger.

  There was a muffled pistol-shot that didn’t crack as loudly as it should have done, and a blackened patch of gunpowder burst against the shimmering air between Lady Caro and the Old Parrasian leader. It stayed there, too; a visible indicator that there was indeed an almost invisible wall of magic between the girls and their assailants.

  “Good grief!” said Annabel, her ears ringing a little. “Did she know the protection was there, do you think?”

  “With Lady Caro, it could be either,” Isabella said. Lifting her voice a little, she called, “Is everyone uninjured?”

  There was a general chorus of agreement, between which Annabel heard Lady Caro say distinctly, “Unfortunately.” Her eyes were locked with the eyes of the man she had very nearly shot, and he was actually sweating.

  It was in that little piece of shocked time that Annabel drew out her own pistol and levelled it at the leader as well. “You should really drop your pistols, now,” she said. “Actually, I’d like to shoot you right now and save the trouble of executing you later, but I don’t think I’ve got the authority until I’m officially crowned. Also, my friend doesn’t like her clothes to get dirty, and I’m pretty fond of her.”

  “Put his down?” said one of the other men, incredulously. “We’ve all got our pistols on you! Wha
t do you think will happen if you pull the trigger?”

  “If it comes to that, what do you think will happen?” Annabel asked, hoping they couldn’t see the sweat on her brow. “Last time, your pistols lost their firing pins. What do you think will happen this time?”

  “She’s bluffing,” said another of the men. “She can’t have taken care of all of the pistols. All she did was hold up that—she held up the pencil! That’s the staff!”

  In the brief silence that followed, Annabel saw Lady Caro kick the invisible magic wall in disgust. She wasn’t sure if Lady Caro was merely disappointed not to be a part of the fight any longer, or if she was irritated at Annabel’s handling of the situation.

  Ruefully—because, really, she hadn’t handled it very well—Annabel lifted her pencil once again, and reversed it. No time for subtleties this time.

  “You’d better both duck,” she said to Isabella and Lady Selma, and erased the first pistol without too much care for the fingers that were holding it.

  A shot whistled past Annabel, far too close for comfort, and Lady Selma bolted away toward the trees. Isabella hissed and ducked, though to Annabel’s considerable approval, she didn’t try to drag Annabel down with her. That gave Annabel the chance to keep erasing pistols without losing concentration. She was erasing the third as a second shot went wildly astray, and half of the Old Parrasians turned to face the opposite direction.

  “Good heavens!” said Isabella. “It’s Melchior! Nan, you’d better keep erasing pistols, or he’s going to be shot.”

  “What a show-off,” said Annabel. She furiously erased the fourth pistol as Melchior leaped down the hill toward them, his necktie askew and his hair utterly disarranged. “He’s making his coat billow like that on purpose. I bet he’s even using magic to do it. Why couldn’t he stay out of the way until the pistols were gone!”

  “I don’t think he cares about the pistols,” observed Isabella.